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We are now up to day #19 and our homes should be getting in decent order! A little over half way and we hope you are feeling great and encouraged!
Day #19 Challenge – Organize Living Area Surfaces
Over time, it can be amazing what the surfaces in your home accumulate. When we are talking surfaces, we mean table tops, tops of shelves, top of the fireplace mantle, entertainment centers, etc. The surfaces where things get set down and out of place.
So, just go through your living areas (living room/family room) and organize the surfaces of these areas. I honestly didn’t take many pictures as there wasn’t a lot to report – it was a nice and fast task, but a little surface organizing makes for a nice look and feel to your home.
I did take a picture of one area – the digital piano. This piano is so cool! My parents bought this piano used about 20 years ago. It has been through a few moves that my parents had made over the years and even one big, out-of-state move.
Well, our kids wanted to start learning piano, my parents were now “empty nesters.” I am the oldest, so I got married and had kids first.
We didn’t have it planned in our budget to either start piano and buy a piano (even used). My parents gave us this piano to give to our kids for Christmas a few years ago. They started taking online free piano lessons that I had found.
Later this year, we reworked our budget a little to take piano lessons from a teacher. We have a good friend that is teaching 5 of our family members (including yours truly!) for an amazing price. This piano is serving us well and we have been blessed to provide music lessons all for very little expense. Anyway, not that this is related to today’s organization challenge, but sometimes it’s fun to hear tidbits of our personal lives too. 🙂
Well, the piano surfaces needed some organizing. We had been storing the books under the piano, which really wasn’t a great place.
Earlier in our challenges, we had talked about magazine organization. We shared a link to a tutorial on making your own magazine holders, or even buying nice, but very affordable ones from IKEA. Well, since the ones at IKEA are a no brainer, I just went with those! But, we live quite far from IKEA and so we only go a couple of times a year. So, if you are like me and IKEA is not close, Amazon sells their magazine files HERE and with the Prime shipping, mine arrived in a couple of days. So this is what I did! Amazon’s prices on them are not quite as cheap as the actual IKEA store, but with the cost of gas figured in and compared to other magazine file prices, this was still the best option for me.
Well, I decided to use one of these for the piano books. I think it was a great option! I plan to go back and cover the file box with music sheet paper for a fun and attractive design!
Other than that “big” change, organizing all of the rest of the surfaces was so slick, easy and smooth from table tops, mantles…. but I did run into this strange pile behind the piano book stand (apparently the hidden place on the piano).
According to some of our kids, they were doing a craft and didn’t know where to put the rest of the stuff – so behind the piano book stand sounded like a great option. Oh well! If Alex or I hadn’t seen it for a while, then I am sure no one else coming to our house did either. But I will look behind here a little more often.
Well, that’s it for today!
We hope you have a great day and feel encouraged by a super easy task that can make your home feel organized quickly! I am happy for these lighter tasks this week as next week is going to be a little bit more work as we do areas that are necessary, but sometimes challenging.
How is your challenge going?
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To help you find some thrifty and DIY organization ideas, see our organization category HERE (click on the organization tag!) and our Organization Pinterest Board HERE. Looking for encouragement, inspiration and a place to ask questions and share answers? Request to join our private Facebook group HERE.
Jolene
I remember reading about your 20 minute daily clean-ups, in which all the kids help straighten the house. I can just imagine them (or one of them) scurrying to and fro looking for a good place for the craft supplies, then stuffing them behind the piano stand! Made me chuckle! My husband and I have an empty nest, so we don’t get surprises like that—–but we spend our time trying to remember where it was that WE put something!
Cassie
Ha – yes, that is probably a great point! I don’t mind it too much because I am sure I will miss it one day. 🙂